Thursday, September 10, 2009

The British, god bless us, do many things well, but building sports cars isn't one of them. We used to build a car called the TVR - a car so uncool it's name was a shortened version of "Trevor" - a car so insane it put a v8 engine inside a light-weight chassis - a car so loud and shouty that Jeremy Clarkson famously said of it, "it will kill you". Further, "my wife loves this car. She loves the noise and the vibrations and the sense of danger and the way that when you over-rev it, the whole dash lights up like a baboon's backside. Richard Hammond on the other hand, he pretty much hates it. He says its too difficult and too complicated and that all the stitching in here looks like the kind of stitching you find when someone's tried to mend their own shoes."

I feel the same way about G I JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA. Your teenage kid brother might like it, but what does he know, eh?

G I JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA isn't so bad, it's good. It's so bad, period. Much like the TRANSFORMERS flicks, similarly spawned from shitty kids toys, the movie is heavy on ludicrous CGI special effects and loud-shouty battle scenes. In the brief spaces when the fighting stops, there's a lot of rather convoluted plot crammed in. Essentially, there are bunch of baddie arms dealers who've created nano-bot super-soldiers. On the other side, there are a bunch of tooled up soldiers who are trying to stop them. In the middle, there's a chick who used to be in love with the good guy but who is know kicking ass for the baddies. But hey, apparently even a woman scorned can't resist beefcake Channing Tatum.

The resulting movie is just no fun. It's actually pretty boring being brutalised by non-stop loud battle scenes. All of which is a crying shame, because idiotic, puerile premise apart, this movie has pedigree. The DP is Mitchell Amundsen, of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III, BOURNE SUPREMACY, and PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN fame. The script was written by Stuart Sommers, who wrote the far funnier MUMMY movies. Not to mention the fact that you have people who can actually act - Joseph Gordon Levitt, Christopher Eccleston - in major roles. God knows why they went for this flick. Let's hope they, Tatum, Miller et al, have paid for their respective new houses and can now all get back to the indie flicks they're known for.